The Renew Wales Pallet Furniture Making project is an initiative that was designed to promote awareness and encourage people to take action on environmental issues.

The workshops, run by Renew Mentor Sam Holt, alongside help from Sam Easterbrook and Renew Co-Ordinator Cindy Chen, were held in The Abacus, which is Cardiff’s newest creative space for Artists, thinkers, musicians, and other creatively blooded people to explore, practice and develop their ideas. The space is a collaborative venture between Cardiff based Arts Collective the Modern Alchemists and the dynamic organisation Promo Cymru.

The Abacus aims to be a platform for the grassroots creative community of Cardiff, but to reach this stage, it was in need of being filled cheaply as it was quite an empty space. This is partly what sparked the furniture making workshops and staff members & volunteers from ProMo-Cymru have been busy creating furniture out of wooden pallets to help furnish it.

Arielle Tye, Project Coordinator for The Abacus explained: “When we took over this space, it was completely empty and we had little resources to do it up. We thought of creating furniture out of pallets as we really like the idea of reusing pallets and turning them into unusual pieces. With the help of our coordinator and mentor, we were able to make really interesting and useful furniture which has turned into a talking point for many of our visitors."

In the first workshops, sofas were built, but leading up to Christmas, they had an idea to try something different. Sam had seen some wooden Christmas trees displayed in Cardiff Bay and thought it would be a great idea to attempt to recreate this as part of the workshop to give The Abacus a nice festive feel.

In order to reuse the old wooden pallets, they had to first take off the rusty nails and saw them down. They used a clever tool that was specially designed to remove the planks from the pallets, which made the whole process a lot quicker. Once the planks had gone through this process, they were ready to be transformed into anything that the team could think to make them into.

Around 400,000 Christmas trees are bought in Wales every year generating 8,000 tonnes of rubbish, the same weight as 25,000 reindeer! Real trees are recyclable whereas plastic ones are not, but recycling old wooden pallets is a fantastic idea to be completely sustainable and decorate for free.

More than anything else, schemes such as these workshops are a fantastic way to bring people together and make people realise how much potential there is in simple tasks to create impressive results. Sam Holt’s know-how and enthusiasm when it came to woodwork was inspiring to those who attended the sessions. The workshops drew fantastic feedback from everyone and many who perhaps hadn’t done this sort of thing before, were motivated to take on more projects like this in the future and go on to teach people themselves.

Renew Wales Coordinator, Cindy Chen, told us: "Sam Holt has been a perfect mentor for this project. With his friendly and energetic approach, he was able to inspire and guide a group of staff and volunteers with little or no carpentry knowledge into creating well-made pieces of furniture. Through the three workshops he has delivered, the group has picked up lots of useful skills and gained enough confidence to continue making environmentally friendly furniture for their visitors to enjoy."

From all the photos and video of this project, you can see how well everything turned out and how much of a positive experience it was for everyone involved. Renew Wales is proud to be a part of this initiative and we hope that it will inspire more people to think about engaging in projects like this in the future.